The concept of being in beta is great to test whether there would be resistance to offerings and why. Although the number of Twitter users is relatively small, it is a much bigger crowd than just the one customer who bought something custom from you and thought it was a good product. Before you go ahead and make that a product, find more than one way to test its marketability.

Both posts have great ideas on what to consider and how to implement twitter in your business.

Friend lists enable you to organize your friends into groups. With friend lists, you can get updates from your family separately from your coworkers, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

Another new feature is seeing a feed of your friend along with all of their subscriptions:

You can now see a feed of a person and all of their subscriptions. This new feature is a great way to show your uninitiated friends what your FriendFeed experience is like, and it is a great way to find interesting people you haven’t subscribed to yet.

This year’s convention sees multiple firsts in technological innovations for the quadrennial political party gathering. For starters, the Democratic National Convention Committee is providing bloggers (and floor delegates) with “video-upload booths” where they can upload their footage to YouTube or any other online-video platform.

The DNC is using text messaging and streaming video to keep delegates (and those following along at home) up to date.

Their story also contains great hi-rez photos of the DNC setup along with discussions of other technologies and support that are in place for bloggers covering the convention.

We’ve got some big plans ahead. With more resources and Amazon’s expertise in building a platform where people come to share ideas, there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will benefit each of you. In the meantime, you’ll continue to have access to the great community and tools that you’ve always known and used on the site.

Bethesda’s Honest Tea launched its blog in late 2005 as a way to get close to customers. With a name like Honest Tea, chief executive Seth Goldman said, “we’re trying to be as open and disclose as much information as we can.” When the company announced that Coca-Cola would acquire a 40 percent interest in the brand, many of Honest Tea’s customers who opposed the agreement took their complaints to the blog.

“We gave a very loud voice to the people who said they weren’t happy about this decision,” Goldman said.

Goldman then took one of the most thoughtful, detailed customer criticisms and responded to each point. Even if readers still didn’t agree, “The blog at least helps people see how we think about it,” Goldman said.

All that said, many companies are just now beginning to utilize the power of the internet through blogs in order to have a real dialogue – or conversation – with their customers. [Read more…]

There’s a pretty well known secret among top Facebook application developers: one developer is generating over $1 million a month. Who is that developer exactly? Well, most people won’t talk about it and after some prodding around we’ve narrowed down the suspects. We aren’t going to post them though because ultimately it doesn’t matter who the individual is. All that matters is that a top application that is used for entertainment purposes is generating over $1 million a month.

There’s no doubt about it, I’m in love with the cloud. Some people might not share my fascination with storage-in-the-cloud and compute-in-the-cloud models but I can’t wait to have the same computing experience regardless of the computer or device I’m using to connect to the Internet. I’ve taken it upon myself to change my workflow and digital lifestyle to get as much of my data online and make use of web-based tools until that utopian time comes. Here’s how I do it and you can do the same.

Beginning Monday, hundreds of bloggers will descend on Denver to see Barack Obama accept his party’s nomination. Next week, hundreds more will travel to St. Paul to witness John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. But now these online partisans, many of whom are self-financed, must contend with all the logistical and financial hurdles just to get there — not to mention the party politics happening behind the scenes.

This year, both parties understand the need to have greater numbers of bloggers attend. While many Americans may watch only prime-time television broadcasts of the convention speeches, party officials also recognize the ability of bloggers to deliver minute-by-minute coverage of each day’s events to a niche online audience.

To put this into perspective, the 2004 DNC in Boston credentialed only around twelve bloggers. This year, hundreds of bloggers have been credentialed at both convention. The micro-coverage from the smaller blogs and in-depth coverage provided by the larger blogs is going to elevate the artform of political blogging to a whole new level.